Chapter 50- The Cultists(1)

Chapter 50: 50- The Cultists(1)

Up on the wagon, the Confessor climbed onto the footboard, took the curved silver knife from around his neck, and knelt beside the singing man.

"Go up clean, Brother Thomas," the Confessor whispered, and drew the blade from ear to ear in a single, smooth cut.

The singing cut off in a wet gurgle.

As hot red and purple blood flooded across the polished surface of the mirror, running down the carved grooves into the waiting silver buckets at the rear of the cart, the thirty-one remaining cultists threw their heads back and let out a high, shivering moan of pure religious ecstasy.

When the crippled man’s heart stopped thirty seconds later and the Silver Eye above began pulling his corpse apart into a rising column of silver mist that reflected blindingly off the mirror beneath him, the three High-Stage acolytes dipped their bare fingers into the blood-buckets at the back of the wagon and smeared the warm, tainted blood across their own faces and eyelids, licking it off their lips while trembling from head to toe.

"The Mother drinks!" one of the acolytes gasped, his eyes rolling back as the fresh blood-taint hit his tongue.

"Look how fast She takes him! Not a scrap of bone left on the glass!"

The Confessor stood up on the mirror-wagon, wiping his silver knife on his white robe, and picked up the small, jagged Low-Stage shard that had condensed out of Thomas’s chest onto the blood-streaked glass.

He was about to step down from the wagon and order the procession to resume pulling when one of the three blood-smeared acolytes at the rear of the cart suddenly stopped licking his fingers.

The acolyte was a gaunt woman whose eyes had been sewn shut with silver wire, a sensory mutant from the Choir’s inner quarry.

Her nostrils flared wide in the freezing wind, her head snapping around like a bird-dog toward the southern edge of the concrete overpass, directly above the collapsed pier where Sol and Valera were crouched.

"Father," the blind acolyte hissed, her voice dropping an octave as she pointed a blood-red finger straight down at the rubble pile forty feet away. "There is something under the bridge."

The Confessor paused on the wagon step, his hand tightening on his bell-staff. "Beasts, Sister Mara?"

"No," Sister Mara whispered, taking two steps toward the broken concrete railing and leaning over the edge, sniffing the salt-wind so hard the silver stitches across her eyelids pulled tight.

"Two hearts. Beating fast. And... and there is no grace in them, Father! One is cold as an empty grave, and the other... the other smells like strange! He’s hot! Clean red blood without a single drop of the Mother’s rot!"

Down behind the fallen pier, Sol didn’t wait for them to peer over the railing.

"They felt us," Sol muttered, standing up out of his crouch and drawing the six-pound carbon-steel hatchet from his belt ring.

"Stay close."

"Sol, there’s thirty of them," Valera said, standing up beside him and slamming her Night-iron gauntlets together to form a quarter-inch crust of spiked blue ice over her knuckles.

"And that priest has a Peak core."

"Half of them are either broken or Low-Stage," Sol said, stepping out from behind the concrete pillar onto the snow-covered gravel slope before the cultists could drop down on top of their heads from the bridge deck.

"If we run dragging a two-hundred-pound sled across open salt flats, they’ll run us down in ten minutes. If we drop the sled, we lose the Level 2 scales and our food."

Above them, along the broken railing of the highway overpass, thirty-one heads appeared, looking down the twenty-foot rubble slope at the two figures standing beside the loaded pine sled.

In Sol’s thermal vision, the reaction of the thirty-one cultists wasn’t like a Vane patrol spotting fugitives, or a Gomorrah gang spotting loot.

Every single heart rate along that concrete railing spiked simultaneously into a frantic, hammering frenzy.

"Sinners," one of the barefoot pullers whispered, staring down at Sol’s heavy wolf-fur coat and the massive stack of smoked serpent meat strapped to the sled.

"Look how thick their coats are. Look how they hide their skin from the sky!"

"Selfish," another puller moaned, scratching at the raw crystal chips embedded in his own cheek until they bled.

"Hoarding warm blood in their veins while the Mother starves above us!"

The Peak-Stage Confessor didn’t jump down from the railing.

He walked calmly down the sloped rubble bank where the concrete ramp had collapsed, using his bronze bell-staff like a walking stick, while the three High-Stage acolytes and twenty-seven mutated pullers fanned out in a wide crescent across the snow behind him, cutting off the road back to the highway.

The Confessor stopped fifteen feet in front of Sol and Valera.

He was a tall, gaunt man with pale, sunken cheeks and no eyebrows, he had shaved every hair off his body so nothing would come between his skin and the Moon’s light.

Around his neck, the curved silver skinning-knife still dripped dark purple droplets of Brother Thomas’s blood onto the front of his white robe.

"Peace to you, travelers," the Confessor said, smiling warmly as he planted the butt of his staff in the snow, making the bronze bell give a single, dull clang.

"I am Father Julian, Shepherd of the Third Quarry. You do not need to hold that little iron axe so tight, my son. We are not bandits from the western pits.

""Good," Sol said from behind his linen blindfold, keeping the hatchet held low beside his thigh.

"Because we don’t have anything to trade with the Sanctuary. Keep your people on the ramp, take your mirror-cart west, and we’ll wait here until you’re over the hill."

Father Julian tilted his head, his pale eyes moving from the linen wrap over Sol’s eyes down to the cloth mask hiding Valera’s face, and finally to the matte-black sheen of the Night-iron gauntlets on her hands.